Lester Flatt (1914–79) was relieved when Dave ‘Stringbean’ Akeman left Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1945, for Flatt felt the group was better off without a banjo, which had been hindering their efforts to play faster and cleaner than anyone had before. But Monroe agreed to audition a 21-year-old banjoist from western North Carolina, and Earl Scruggs ...
From its roots, country music has been associated with simplicity – in melody, in subject-matter and in instrumentation, and it is this that has perhaps ensured its longevity. However, all good musicians make their craft look simple, and the history of country music is packed with virtuosos, from the pioneering banjoist Earl Scruggs, through ...
Keyboard percussion instruments include the western xylophone, marimba, vibraphone and glockenspiel, the log xylophones and marimbas of Africa and Central America, and the barred instruments played in the Indonesian gamelan. The orchestral xylophone, marimba and glockenspiel have thin wooden or metal rectangular bars laid out like a chromatic piano keyboard. The back row of bars – ...
Acoustic Guitar Throughout its history, the guitar has – perhaps more than any other instrument – managed to bridge the gap between the often disconnected worlds of classical, folk and popular music. Its roots go back to Babylonian times; by the 1500s it was prevalent in Spain, and is still sometimes called the Spanish guitar. Medieval versions – ...
Few genres are as closely identified with one person as bluegrass is with Bill Monroe (vocals, mandolin, 1911–96). Monroe not only defined the style’s instrumentation, style and repertoire, he also hired most of its major figures and gave the music its name – taken from his group, The Blue Grass Boys. Kentucky Roots Raised on his ...
(Vocal/instrumental duo, 1945–80s) In much the same way that Earl Scruggs revolutionized the banjo with his three-finger roll, Jesse McReynolds (vocals, mandolin, b. 1927) transformed the mandolin with his pioneering cross-picking and split-string innovations. Like Scruggs, he was lucky to have a partner with an appealing tenor voice to make it easier for the public to ...
Even when he was sober, Jimmy Martin (vocals, guitar, 1927–2005) was willing to tell anyone who would listen why he was the ‘king of bluegrass’. After all, didn’t Bill Monroe’s sound change dramatically when Martin joined The Blue Grass Boys in 1949 ? Didn’t Martin create a brand new honky-tonk/bluegrass hybrid on his great Decca recordings of ...
(Fränts Yo’-sef Hi’-dan) 1732–1809 Austrian composer Joseph Haydn was the most celebrated musician of the late-eighteenth century and the first of the great triumvirate (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) of Viennese classical composers. A tireless explorer and innovator, he did more than anyone to develop the dramatic potential of the sonata style. When he composed his cheerful F major Missa brevis ...
(Vocals, guitar, mandolin, songwriter, b. 1958) Aged only 13, Mississippi-born Stuart joined bluegrass legend Lester Flatt and Nashville Grass for six years until Flatt’s death. After this he enjoyed a six-year spell in The Johnny Cash Show. His first significant solo album was Busy Bee Café (1982). The title track of Hillbilly Rock (1990) largely sums ...
Ricky Skaggs was born on 18 July 1954, in Cordell, Kentucky, and from the age of five Skaggs and his trusty mandolin have been almost inseparable. A child prodigy, he was invited on stage to play a tune at a Bill Monroe concert at the age of six, and a year later, he appeared on ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1960s) Clarence White (guitar, 1944–73) and his brother Roland White (vocals, mandolin, b. 1938) grew up in Maine and then California but they called their string band The Kentucky Colonels. That’s where Clarence pioneered the concept of lead acoustic guitar in a bluegrass band and became a legend to pickers everywhere. When Clarence switched to ...
Unlike practically any other strain of indigenous American music, bluegrass can be traced back to a particular time and a particular group of men: Kentucky-born mandolin player/bandleader Bill Monroe and a select handful of musicians he gathered in his band, The Bluegrass Boys. Monroe and the celebrated 1940s vintage line-up of The Bluegrass Boys first transformed traditional acoustic guitar-fiddle-bass-fiddle ...
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, opera was established in some form in most major European centres. The basic types of serious and comic opera in both Italian and French traditions shared similarities, although the content and style of an operatic entertainment could vary according to whether it was intended to flatter a private patron, resound with ...
Jazz and blues are rooted in the enormous technological and social transformations affecting the USA and Western Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. The most striking changes were the advent of easier and cheaper travel; better communications; electric lighting; improvements in audio recording and moving pictures; increased urbanization; and the rise of the US, concurrent with the fall ...
The temptation is to think of bluegrass as an ancient music, for its repertoire and instrumentation stretch back into the shadowy mists of the nineteenth century. But in many ways bluegrass was a radical innovation, a music of the modern world, a sound invented just a decade before rock’n’roll. It was a new/old music, and that central ...
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David Bowie
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